The Other Side of a Frontier, page 55
In his family he wrote that he is ‘more estranged than a stranger’ and at the office he is alien because he is a writer. In love he is in conflict with literature. Because he was an extreme case which was exacerbated by fatally bad health, Kafka was able to enlarge, as by a microscope, the sense of exile which becomes visible as a characteristic of our experience in this century, its first martyr to ‘alienation’, which has become something of a cult.
When we turn from his books to his letters we have a series of self-portraits desperate and courageous, always eager and warm in feeling; the self is lit by fantasy and, of course, by drollery. His candour is of the kind that flies alongside him in the air. He was a marvellous letter writer. For these reasons alone the present translation of the Briefe first published in 1958 and collected by his great friend Max Brod is worth having. Richard and Clara Winston, the American translators, tell us that it is based on that volume and it is not clear to me whether ‘based’ means the whole thing or a selection from that volume – I fancy, the whole. (Other parts of Kafka’s large correspondence have been translated, notably the important Letters to Felice by James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth in 1973.) The present volume does contain now the full text of his long letter explaining his break with Julie Wohryzek to her sister, and the whole of the long letter to his parents a few days before he died in 1924 at the age of forty-one. There are also a few letters (of slight interest) to Martin Buber.
We hear the authentic Kafka when he is writing in a girl’s album that words cannot carry memories because they are ‘clumsy mountaineers and clumsy miners’; or to a fellow student when he is nineteen:
When we talk together, the words are hard; we tread over them as if they were rough pavement. The most delicate things acquire awkward feet … When we come to things that are not exactly cobblestones or the Kunstwart [a cultural magazine, of Nietzschean tendency, edited by a nephew of Richard Wagner: another kind of paving], we suddenly see that we are in masquerade, acting with angular gestures (especially me, I admit), and then we suddenly become sad and bored … You see, we’re afraid of each other, or I am.
Later on, letters are comparable to ‘mere splashings of the waves on different shores: the waves do not reach one’. In 1916, quick to admit that his stories are painful, he adds proudly that he wants to be ‘truly a man of his time’. In 1922 when his many illnesses have united to become the fatal tuberculosis of the larynx, he writes to Robert Klopstock, the young medical student who was often with him in his last years, that he wants no indissoluble bonds, beyond the tacit, with men or women:
Is there anything so strange about this anxiety? A Jew, and a German besides, and sick besides, and in difficult personal circumstances besides – those are the chemical forces with which I propose to straightaway transmute gold into gravel or your letter into mine, and while doing so remain in the right.
That may sound bitter, but he is really thinking about his role as a writer of fables who reverses the classic manner of fable in order to be truly that man of his time. Again:
The writer … is a scapegoat of mankind. He makes it possible for men to enjoy sin without guilt, almost without guilt.
He sways between assertion and qualification, between reaching out to the gold of friendship and retiring into defensive strategies. They are necessary, especially in his relations with women, in order to pursue literature and nothing else. Such manoeuvres have a sick man’s pedantry, but in fact the self-irony, the kindness, the nimbleness, the fantasy, mask the pain. When it is certain that he is terribly ill he begs that this shall be kept from his parents and adds that his:
earthly possessions have been on the one hand increased by the addition of tuberculosis, on the other hand somewhat diminished.
He imagines a battle of words going on between brain and lungs; talks of clinging to the disease like a child to the pleats of his mother’s skirts. During a longish period at the house of his beloved sister Ottla at the village of Zürau he is plagued by country noises. A girl plays the piano across the street, children scream, men chop down trees, next comes the scream of the circular saw, then the loading of logs into an ox wagon, the noise of the oxen, the shunting of the trains going away. A tinsmith starts hammering. Noise, he says, is the scaffolding within which he works; perhaps in the end, he says, noise is a fascinating narcotic. And then the house is alive with mice and the long half-farcical, half-obsessional drama continues for many letters. The creatures race round the room – he has the fancy that he can frighten them off by making his eyes glow like a cat’s. He gets a cat in, the cat shits in his slippers; when the cat quietens the mice he still sits up half the night ‘to take over a portion of the cat’s assignment’.
Certainly this fear, like an insect phobia, is connected with the unexpected, uninvited, inescapable, more or less silent, persistent, secret aim of these creatures, with the sense that they have riddled the surrounding walls through and through with their tunnels and are lurking within, that the night is theirs … Their smallness, especially, adds another dimension to the fear they inspire.
We see by his speculations about a Mouse Sanatorium that he is on the edge of one of his breakdowns and that soon he will once more find himself in hospital.
In love, Kafka sought perfection, knowing that it was an impossibility; knowing also the ideal served as a defence as ingenious as an insurance company’s refusal to admit a claim. The most honest statement of this defence is in the long letter to Julie’s sister, a confessional document of pitiless and subtle self-searching and, as always, frankly expressing his guilt – elsewhere he said that guilt so easily turned to nostalgia. The sincerity, and above all the sensibility to friendship, in letters to women, give them a spontaneous grace. The self he is preserving is in no way hard but clearly expatiated. Yet it glows under the friendship he receives and also offers.
As a sick man he is, one might say, negotiating a life which he knows is diminishing. He has the patient’s ironical interest in the clinical state of his condition; and when he says, for example, that there is something fundamentally childlike in the Czechs of Prague, he describes a trait many foreigners have noted in the most tormented of all European cities, and a quality he shares. There is something of Italo Svevo, who was also partly Jewish, in his exploration of his condition: illness is a kind of second self that has cleverly moved in on him.
There is scarcely anything about the 1914–18 war – illness secluded Kafka – although he does have a few incidental lines about the shortage of food and, afterwards, some anxious joking about German inflation, especially in Berlin. He is even detached about anti-Semitism: this is interesting because he shows how active anti-Semitism was in the early twenties in Germany; he makes a distinction between the Eastern European and the Western European Jews: the former were beginning to go to Palestine, to which he too was emotionally drawn and from which he withdrew: a spectator.
Kafka’s most revealing things come most naturally in the letters to Max Brod, who is the strong, ever active, positive, generous and successful writer. Kafka reads Brod’s latest works as they come out, comments on them with enthusiastic interest and also takes over Brod’s marital troubles in the manner of a brother exhaustive in advice. There is a letter to Brod in 1923, written from Berlin-Steglitz, which shows the continuous circling of Kafka’s self-awareness:
It is true that I do not write to you, but not because I have anything to conceal (except to the extent that concealment has been my life’s vocation), nor because I would not long for an intimate hour with you, the kind of hour we have not had, it sometimes seems to me, since we were staying together at the north Italian lakes. (There is a certain point in my saying this, because at the time we had truly innocent innocence – perhaps that’s not worth regretting – and the evil powers, whether on good or bad assignments, were only lightly fingering the entrances through which they were going to penetrate some day, an event to which they were already looking forward with unbearable rejoicing.) So if I do not write, that is due chiefly to ‘strategic’ reasons as have become dominant for me in recent years. I do not trust words and letters, my words and letters; I want to share my heart with people but not with phantoms that play with the words and read the letters with slavering tongue. Especially I do not trust the letters, and it is a strange belief that all one has to do is seal the envelope in order to have the letter reach the addressee safely. In this respect, by the way, the censorship of mail during the war years, years of particular boldness and ironic frankness on the part of the phantoms, has proved instructive.
I forgot to add to my remark above: It sometimes seems to me that the nature of art in general, the existence of art, is explicable solely in terms of such ‘strategic considerations’, of making possible the exchange of truthful words from person to person.
Letters like this take one straight across the bridge from Kafka’s private life into The Castle and The Trial, both of course unfinished and published after his death. There was a great deal of Swift (whom he read attentively) in Kafka’s ‘mad’ imagination, above all in his habit of seeing people and sensations exactly, microscopically, as objects. He was much taken by Swift’s inflexible remarks on marriage and the bringing up of children. The letters to women have even something of Swift’s advisory playfulness, and are all gentle to a degree one would have thought unlikely in a man so self-enclosed, alone, and perhaps even proud, with some delicacy of manner, of being incurable.
An Irish Oblomov
There is a terrifying sentence in James Stephens’s account of his meeting with Joyce in Dublin that unfortunately came to my mind when I was struggling with Samuel Beckett’s trilogy, Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable – ‘I looked at him,’ says Stephens, ‘without a word in my mouth except vocabulary.’ Will someone not chart the vivid but interminable ocean of Irish garrulity for us, point out the shallows and the depths, tell us where the words are vocabulary only and where they connote ideas or things, where they are propitiatory magic, where egomania filling in time and place? Where is language used for language’s sake, and where is it used as a gabble-gabble ritual to make tolerable the meaninglessness of life? It would be of practical help to know whether a writer was drowning well within his own depth or out of it; and when it would be decent to leave him to it – possibly coming back later, after a smoke, to see how he was getting on.
One does this with Tristram Shandy. One does it with Finnegans Wake. Pending necromantic guidance, with Beckett’s novels, one does the same. They are lawsuits that never end, vexations, litigations joined with the tedium, the greyness, the grief, the fear, the rage, the clownishness, the physical miseries of old age where life is on the ebb, and nature stands by smiling idiotically. Why was I born, get me out of this, let me live on less and less, get me to the grave, the womb, the last door, dragging this ludicrous, feeble, windy broken old bag of pipes with me. Find me a hole. Give me deafness and blindness; chop off the gangrened leg; somewhere on this rubbish dump where I crawl there must be some final dustbin, where I can dribble, laugh, cry and maunder on the this and the that of the general mystery and occasionally give a toothless grin over an obscene word or a farcical sexual memory.
Flight, old age, and the wrangle about personal identity, these are Samuel Beckett’s themes. A man is a vestige left to hop around in wearying argy-bargy after his invisible master: punishment, for the old, unremembered sin. Life is the belle dame with the mindless smirk and she hardly troubles to look at the victim who has been reduced to the total lethargy of compulsive speech. That is the joke: the mutilated thing can talk. In the first volume the man is Molloy, the tramp with crutches, a mixture of simplicity, hurt and lunatic energy. He can still spit with contempt at society:
One of us at last! Green with anguish. A real little terrestrial! Choking in the chlorophyll. Hugging the slaughterhouse walls! Paltry priests of the irrepressible ephemeral!
He bashes along on his bicycle, through the town, trying to get to his mother. He runs over a dog –
an ineptness all the more unpardonable as the dog, duly leashed, was not out on the road, but in on the pavement, docile at his mistress’s heels. Precautions are like resolutions, to be taken with precaution. The lady must have thought she had left nothing to chance, so far as the safety of her dog was concerned, whereas in reality she was setting the whole system of nature at naught, no less surely than I myself with my insane demands for more light. But instead of grovelling in my turn, invoking my great age and infirmities, I made things worse by trying to run away. I was soon overtaken by a bloodthirsty mob of both sexes and all ages, for I caught a glimpse of white beards and little angel faces, and they were preparing to tear me to pieces.
– but the lady stopped them, saying she was taking the dog to the vet to be put down, in any case, and he had saved her a painful task.
This volume has all Beckett’s headlong comic gift. Molloy is in the clownish state of senility, his disqualified life has the spirit of either a fairy-tale or inverted idyll; and in his pestiferous search for ‘more light’ on everything and nothing – mostly the latter – there is a grin half of mockery and half of frenzy on his scabby face. His sexual memories are funny because they are few, take him by surprise, and they are a mixture of the grotesque and touching, the dirty and the modest. He has dragged his body around all his life, and it follows him like some ignorant valet. There is far more to compare with Tristram Shandy in the caprices of this volume and its exploits in self-contradiction in order to hold the floor, than there is with Joyce.
In the second volume, Malone Dies, we move from the freedom of rebellion to loneliness. Malone, by the way, may be another aspect of Molloy; he doesn’t know who he is. As far as I can make out the scene of the novel is a madhouse or infirmary for the old, and Beckett becomes the grammarian of solitude. The senses are dying. How does Malone know where the veils of air end and the prison walls begin? The body turns in smaller and smaller circles; the mind conjugates trifles. Here Beckett intervenes with some satirical observation of normal people, a trite couple and their favourite son, a piece which might have come out of Sartre’s Nausée, or Nathalie Sarraute, and we are reminded that Beckett writes his novels first in French.
But we return to endless hair-splitting, metaphysical speculation sliding from association to association, and these convey that as age increases the tedium of life, so the unwearying little talker in the brain, with his lawsuit against life, bosses every half minute of it. Grief and pity hang between his words; but the book unexpectedly ends in wholesale murder, when the feeble-minded inmates of the infirmary are taken out on a picnic.
In the third volume, Molloy, Malone, Mahood, Murphy – whatever the name is now – is a lump, almost sightless, stone deaf, always weeping, mutilated, immovable, the helpless centre of a world that he can be conscious of very rarely. He is about to become Worm, all human identity gone. The archaeological kind of critic who can recover a novel from its ruins might be able to make something of this volume. I find it unreadable, in the sense that I cannot move from paragraph to paragraph, from page to page. It is all significance and no content.
The stream of consciousness, so lively and going dramatically from image to image in Joyce, is here a stream of imageless verbosity occasionally broken by a jab of obscene anger, but grey, grey, and it goes monotonously along in phrases usually about seven words long, like some regularly bumping old tram. This is, of course, not so much the stream of consciousness as the stream of solitude and provides the comedy of overhearing a man talking to himself – Bloom, one recalls, rarely talked; things ‘came up’ in his mind. He was in the midst of drama – a comedy that is genuine enough certainly, but not of boundless interest.
Why is Beckett interesting as a writer? As a contemporary phenomenon, he is one more negative protest against the world going to the slaughterhouse, one more protest on behalf of privacy, a voice for myopia. He is a modern Oblomov, fretful and apathetic, enclosed in private fantasy, dropping off into words instead of sleep. They are eloquent, cunning, unremitting words.
He is far from feeble, for there is a devil-like slyness in the half grin on the faces of his old men who can hit out with their crutches. What tedium! they exclaim – speaking not only of existence and human solitude – but, we suspect, of ourselves. His imagination has the Irish cruelty and self-destructiveness that Yeats once spoke of. Beckett’s anti-novels, like all anti-novels, have to deal with small areas of experience because their pretension is to evoke the whole of life, i.e. life unfixed by art; the result is that these verbose books are like long ironical, stinging footnotes in small print to some theme not formulated. But there is a flash of deep insight in the madness he evokes: it is strange that in a generation which has put all its stress on youth and achievement, he alone should have written about old age, loneliness, and decrepitude, a subject which arouses perhaps our deepest repressed guilt and fears. He is the product of a civilization which has become suddenly old. He is a considerable, muttering comic writer, and although he conveys unbearable pain, he also conveys the element of sardonic tenacity and danger that lies at the heart of the comic gift.
Graham Greene
Disloyalties
English novelists are not notable for their sense of evil. James Hogg of The Confessions of a Justified Sinner has it, and so, in a romantic way, has Stevenson, but both are Scots. Conrad, the Pole, has it; so has Henry James, the American. Among ourselves it is hard to find. There are signs in Clarissa; in Dickens evil appears hysterically in the forms of staged melodrama. Only Emily Brontë fully exposes her imagination to the dark spirit and with a pagan or pantheistic exhilaration and pride which profoundly shocked her contemporaries. For Hardy evil is an aloof and alien polity. It can hardly be called more than mischance. The rest of the English novelists settle for a world which must be judged in terms of right and wrong.
